


Hunger

by tribumvirate



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Backstory, Gen, i blame the dragon in the neighbourhood, lake-town is not a fun place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-12 23:54:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tribumvirate/pseuds/tribumvirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His stomach rumbled and churned with hunger, and in that he was not alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hunger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [millionthline](https://archiveofourown.org/users/millionthline/gifts).



> I really like Bard, but Fionn likes him more, so this is for you, boo.

There were but a few armourers in Lake-town, and still fewer that had any skill as bowers. Bard had since learnt to care for and construct his own weapons and make his own arrows, but on occasion he went down to the east docks to look in on his old teacher.

Harald was a gentle man, and had once thought to take Bard as his apprentice - and he would have done well enough, Bard knew, and the work would have been easy, but the thought of such a comfortably dull life held no appeal. If Harald had ever been a warrior you would not know it now, and Bard could not bear the thought of such obscurity. So he took up his bow and joined the town’s guard, and may have risen high in their ranks if not for the disdain of the Master (which is also why he finds himself so often on barrel duty).

Privately, he thinks Harald's new apprentice is a fool, a bumbling halfwit that spends more time watching his master's daughter when he should be focused on his work. Bard gifts the lad with a sharp elbow to his ribs when he stares too long, and he makes sure not to let his own gaze wander, if only to set a better example.

\---

 

\---

His mother used to tell him stories about the lost city of Dale, and of Girion Who Was King, and how his wife and child had escaped the dragon’s wrath and how that child grew and had children of his own, but wore no crown, carried no title.

She told him of a boy with dark eyes, a wicked smile and clever hands, who used to leave tiny carvings where he knew she would find them - a Dwarf hidden in her basket, a horse on her windowsill, a swan in her boot.

She did not tell him the story of how the boy - grown into a man - had fallen in the lake, with his feet caught up in a ship's rigging. She did not mention how the ship was storm-beaten or how the mast had broken off and dragged the man down deep, for Bard knew that story better than any. He had seen it himself, had dropped his toy dragon in the water and watched it sink down, too.

There was little work to be had for his mother, and Bard had his father’s clever hands. When they should have gone hungry or been without coin, his mother would find a loaf of bread that had not been there the day before or a full purse that she knew was empty when last she checked. If she disapproved, she never said as much.

Bard was no fool. It broke her heart to know - and know she did, he was sure - but survival was worth more than their pride.

It grew easier after the sweating sickness took her. Easier to steal only for himself, to no longer worry about hiding the worst of it from her. 

_(in her delirium she mistook him for his father, cried out, Eld! Eld! and Bard prayed for her to pass, for her to slip away with ease)_

He had not only stolen food and a bit of money, oh no, there was always greater work to be found, and if Bard was quicker and more cunning than any other petty thief or burglar, well...he was a survivor, after all.

On occasion his employer might have a too familiar face beneath his hood, or a glimpse of livery might catch his eye. He knows when to forget what he’s seen, when to hold his tongue.

\---

 

\---

Yrsa has a crooked nose, evidence of a childhood brawl that saw her the victor and three boys left rather more respectful of her fists. Her mother had been the one to set it, and she was never much of a healer, but Yrsa didn’t mind it much.

“I can still breathe through it,” she had said, “I think it’s well enough.”

Yrsa used to post herself in a corner of her father’s workshop and watch him and Bard work. He remembers the feeling of her gaze on his back, the shy smile she would offer when he looked back to see if she was still there. She was always there, waiting for them to stop for lunch with a book of numbers or a scrap of needlework in her lap, like a pale little ghost. _His_ little ghost, he took to calling her, and she would laugh at the name.

_(she doesn’t meet his eye in the market, won’t speak to him when he comes to see Harald_

_she has friends that know what he does and tell her all his dirty deeds)_

Her eyes are pale as the cold skies above the Mountain, clear and bright as a diamond his mother once had, a relic of Dale. He’d sold it to the Master when she first took ill, and she had wept when he told her, but the medicine he got kept her in the cold stage of the sweat for another day. She said he should have treasured it and given it to his wife, whenever he should take one.

Bard thought the loss worth what little he gained, but still he wonders about what became of the jewel, and if Yrsa would have liked it.

\---

 

\---

Bard is seventeen, bruised and scarred and always fresh from a fight. His mother is a year dead, his father nine more, and Harald no longer opens his door to him. Reeves cannot let scrawny crooks hide in their workshops. They must be good and fair to the people that elect them, and Bard understands, he does, but it still hurts. Harald will still embrace him and give him a meal if he comes slinking ‘round like a stray, but he is no longer Bard’s safe haven.

It's made everything more difficult.

He abandons the stolen blade in one of the Elf-barrels, looking mournfully after it before the pounding feet above alerts him to the coming guard. Though heavily gilded and chipped, it’s of Dwarven make, and Bard is hungry for such craftsmanship to be his own. Dwarves don’t come to Lake-town anymore, which is likely a good thing, for who knows if the dragon is still alive, and what if it were to smell Dwarf on its doorstep?

Bard buries it in the apples, marks the lid to find later - hoping there will be a later - and leads the guards on a merry goose chase into the north side of Lake-town, where the buildings have sprouted up too close and there are more hidden doors down to the lower pilings than Bard can count. They lose his trail somewhere between Saer the baker’s and Midwife Mib’s, wandering dumbly through the streets asking all they pass if they have seen Bard. At least he can still trust the people _here_. Not a word is spoken about him, not even by the merchant whose stall Bard crashed through on his way by.

They are all some manner of criminal, and even the honour of thieves is better than none at all.

The barrels are gone when he is finally able to slip back to them. He considers following them upriver, but thinks better of it - there would be elves to contend with then, and even his not-inconsiderable skill with a bow is little match to that of an elf. His Dwarven dagger is lost to whatever lucky Elf finds it.

Bard is seventeen. He is rarely unbruised and he finds a new scar every day. Quick and clever as he is, there is never enough food to fill his belly, never enough money for thicker clothes or new boots. Winters on the Long Lake are cold and long, and the house his father built will not be his for much longer. Something must change.

\---

 

\---

“The town guard? You cannot be serious.”

“I am, sir. Completely.”

“Well - well. I do hope this won’t interfere with your other work, my lad.”

“No, sir. Of course not.”

\---

 

\---

For a time, Bard tried not to see the suffering around him.

 _It could be so much worse,_ he would tell himself, bitter as the rest, sharing in the cold and the hunger with his neighbours. That small truth was a comfort, for Smaug could come back and rain fire on them; the Master could be worse than he was, could be as cruel as he was greedy; if the Elves pitied them any less the people of Lake-town might expect no aid in the lean times. 

It could be worse, but that did not make it any better.

Bard looked around at his neighbours and saw his own pinched, ravenous face looking back. His pockets were full of pilfered silverware the Master had sent him after, not that the man needed it. Nor, for that matter, did the rich bastard Bard stole it from. Saer was far more deserving, Mib, Harald, Yrsa.

He had clever hands, hands that found no challenge in slipping something from a pocket - or into one. 

_(perhaps the blood of kings ran through him, but he was as much a King as he was a bird in the sky_

_Bard had never been fond of heights)_

His stomach rumbled and churned with hunger, and in that he was not alone.

\---

 

\---

Bain is only five when the sweating sickness returns to Lake-town.

Bard and Yrsa take turns sitting up with him during the long watches of the night, wrapping him in blankets during the cold stage and stripping him down to his skin when the heat and sweat comes on. He cries constantly, no matter what they do or say to soothe him. When Bard goes to the nearest healer, he is told only to go home and keep his boy awake, for his next sleep may be his last.

He is walking up and down their little house with Bain against his shoulder when Yrsa begins to shiver.

Bard has never succumbed to the sweat, and he thinks he never will, so he finds a place on their bed, with his wife on one side and his son on the other, and does not fear something so intangible as disease. Lake-town becomes home to naught but the wind as the people shut themselves in to wait out the sickness, only emerging into the open air when food runs low.

Bard stops eating. He preserves what they have left for whenever Bain and Yrsa are able to keep more than water and weak broth in their stomachs.

When Bain’s fever breaks, Bard moves him and his little cot out by the hearth in an effort to spare him from reinfection. Yrsa mumbles and writhes and calls him by her parents’ names. She calls him Thora too, once, and it disturbs him. The only Thora he has ever known was one of her aunts, who was taken by the dragon more than fifty years ago.

And then -

“He is coming,” she hisses, latching onto his sleeve as he mops her brow. “He is coming, Bard.”

It is the first time she’s recognised him since the hot stage began. Bard tries to loosen her grip, pressing her back down into the mattress, and briefly she forgets whatever drove her to speak. The passing of an hour sees her struggling to rise, fighting against Bard with barely enough strength to lift her hands.

“He is coming,” she gasps, collapsing against Bard’s chest. “He is coming...he comes...”

Bard pays her words no mind as he tucks her beneath the sheets. "No, no my love," he murmurs, holding her face in his palms. "He sleeps." The dragon has entangled himself in her mind, nothing more. If some note of foreboding claws at Bard’s mind, he ignores that, too. He leaves her thrashing in half-sleep as Bain calls out for him from the other room.

Yrsa lies unmoving when he returns. She does not stir, no matter how long he tries to wake her.

\---

 

\---

Bard finds a solitary yew growing at the edge of Smaug’s desolation. Though the sapling is healthy, the ground will not support a fully grown tree - and Bard likes the look of it, the feel of the young wood in his hands. He uproots it gently and carries it with him back to the Long Lake, ignoring the snickering of his fellow guards at the sight of grim Bard cradling a seedling to his breast.

He takes it to Harald, for yew takes special preparation and a prowess verging on magical, and Bard lacks the patience and the knowledge to do it himself. The armourer tests the strength of it in his hands, bends and measures and weighs it, and pronounces it a fine bit of wood. 

“You’ve a good sense for it, Bard,” he says, and in his eyes Bard sees the unspoken lament, _Your talents are wasted in the guard._

Bard looks away, pressing his fist into his stomach when it gurgles. Harald laughs and pushes him towards the stairs. “Come and eat, lad,” he says, his arm curled tight around Bard’s shoulders. It makes him feel young again, and warm, and the sight of Yrsa at the hearth alongside her mother tugs sharply at his heart.

He lets Harald push him into a chair, accepts the warm half-pint of mead he presses into Bard’s freezing hands. Yrsa offers him a smile over her shoulder. His hunger pains him.

**Author's Note:**

> I have two versions of Bard's wife in my head. There's this one, of course. The other one probably won't ever see the light of day.
> 
> Also, a reeve was an official elected by the peasants of a town/village to represent the people, or they could be appointed by the lord. Harald was most likely one of the last elected reeves.


End file.
